Radio Club, Auto Lab Advertising Portraits

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User Comments:
• Posted by Brenda Helminen, daughter of David R. Liimatta, MechanicalEngineering graduate, 1962 from an email I got from my dad concerning this picture. Many family and friends recognized my dad in this photo.He's the left-most student in the center of the picture.If that's me in the picture, it was not taken in 1953 but more likely in 1961 or 62. I took that lab and Prof. Bayer was our instructor. The equation on the board is for the fuel specific gravity which means part of the assignment was to determine brake specific fuel consumption". Little did I know then that I'd be spending the rest of my career working with engines and would actually spend hundreds if not thousands of hours in dynamometer cells similar to that one at Tech. As in the picture, we all had khaki pants and plaid shirts in those days. Notice that I had artics with zippers, some of the less sophisticated guys had boots with buckles---yuck. I don't see any slide rules around, but we all had them. Cool guys carried them in their shoulder bags, and the nerds had their cases attached to their belts. Most of us used Post slide rules but mom [Adele M. (Immonen) Liimatta, Chemistry MS grad '61] had a circular one. She was always more accurate than me. As far as the dynamometer cell was concerned, it was very basic in the pre-emission days. When I was at Ethyl corporation, we donated some Infrared instruments so that the engine air/ fuel ratio and fuel distribution could be analyzed from the exhaust gas constituents. Also, I can't imagine that we were standing beside an engine which was revving at high speed with no shielding in front of us. At Holley, Ethyl and Ford, they were alot more safety conscious than we were at Tech. This was a good start me, I loved engines and had the opportunity to work with them my entire career, finishing up as an Engine Design Manager at Ford.dad"
1/19/2006 4:58:47 PM by Anonymous
• This really has nothing to do with the radio club; this image was mis-filed with other images of the radio club, but depicts students testing an automobile engine in the Automotive Laboratory in the Hotchkiss Engineering building. The lab first opened in 1931 when the Michigan College of Mining and Technology first began to offer specialized coursework in automotive engineering. It continued in use for nearly four decades until 1971 when the mechanical engineering department moved into the newly-constructed Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics building (MEEM).
10/25/2005 11:48:57 AM by Erik Nordberg, MTU Archivist
• Gerrit Leeftink- Not sure, but the farthest right and forward student looks like my dad. Again, more like the early 60s than 50s. Picture was published in alumni magazine in 2010.
7/18/2011 4:36:19 PM by Anonymous